Output details

The Act of Killing

I am credited as ‘producer’ on The Act of Killing, but the work grew out of intense and sustained collaborative research through the production company, Vision Machine (2001-2009). I was a founding member of the company, with the film’s director and co-director.

A key aspect of the collaboration was researching the historical and methodological implications of reenactment in documentary and the exchange between the methods of fiction and documentary production that came to deeply define The Act of Killing. My contribution to the film included taking a central role in conducting research, which resulted in numerous authored and co-authored papers (including chapters in such publications as Killer Images (Ten Brink ed. Wallflower/Columbia Press 2012), Fluid Screens/Expanded Cinema (Marchessault and Lord eds. University of Toronto Press, 2007) and Building Bridges (Ten Brink ed. Wallflower 2007). I translated these research findings into a conceptual framework and innovative approach to filmmaking that significantly informed our production. This approach, which I term in my own research ‘archaeological performance’, is a performance-based historiography of political violence that draws extensively on historical reenactment and genre re-stagings. Thus the production process is a research process, and the film is both research method and object.

Throughout the first six years of production I was intensely engaged with the film’s director and co-director as a creative consultant; an essential feature of our collaboration. This involved planning shoots, reviewing and feeding back on hundreds of hours of footage, working on and responding to edits, as well as engaging in the sustained debates around documentary ethics that attended the film’s production. This work also generated an archive of primary material that is of itself of value to researchers – it is the largest collection of AV materials on genocide in N Sumatra.